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20.12.12

A night in Belize City

The wall spits fire at me when I try to plug anything in.

The mattress is thick as a maxi pad, heavy flow days, the slats suspending me over the floor press into my back.

There are no lights in the bathroom, which wouldn’t bother me except for the thick iron strength spider web across the shower door and the sticky, patchy, sketchy tiles. This is exactly the kind of place that promotes shower shoes.

There are bars on the window locked tight, but a shutter on the outside swinging freely, jarring me awake every time the wind blows.

Belize is a small country that takes a long time to cross. The inter mysteries of the chicken buses confounds even the most experienced of travels, the where and they why of the pause or the stop is useless to question.

A man I talked to on the bus turned out to live in the South side of Belize City, he is a gangster in the VFP Village for Peace, but they are a violent gang. I didn’t bother to question him about peaceful violence. He told me Belize city was dangerous and that I shouldn’t stay there, but rolling in at 9pm didn’t give me too many options.

The city itself seems like it doesn’t want to hang out with itself, the place is mostly deserted, everything is shut tight.

Luckily there are 5 foreigners, and safety in numbers we band together.

In desperate need of the correct currency and nutrition we are forced out to forage. The people on the street look a little threatening but I’m SF trained and street wise, a little smile and conversation showed them to be sweet and friendly, though God knows what they’re doing out on the street at that time.

Five foreigners on a dark street at night and these men now know we are all going to the ATM to pull out some money, good work Kristine. Luckily things turned out fine. Dough was grabbed and we found the only place open to eat, a park filled with at least 10 hot dog stands. Only the food cart vendors, a few homeless, and us conjugated there. I found one woman off to the side with beans and rice so I was saved food wise for another evening.

Now bed, shutter slamming, wood slats pushing and an early morning on the rise.

Meditations

"You can't stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes"

~Winnie the Pooh

"Such objects made up the daily luggage of this eternal traveler, rootless soul who made his home in dance studios, rehearsal rooms, and on stages around the world."

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.”

— Aldous Huxley, "Island"

"A true journey is much more than a vivid or vacant interval of being away. The best travel was not a simple train trip or even a whole collection of them, but something lengthier and more complex: an experience of the fourth dimension, with stops and starts and longueurs, spells of illness and recovery, hurrying then having to wait, with the sudden phenomenon of happiness as an episodic reward."

– Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."

– Louise Erdrich

"A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving."

~Lao Tzu

“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”~Anais Nin

"When you are on stage you are having an affair with three thousand people." -Gelsey Kirkland

"For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse it's full length. and there I travel, looking, looking breathlessly."

~Don Juan

"It does not matter how slow you go so long as you do not stop."—Wisdom of Confucius